U-IMG2DSM: Unpaired Simulation of Digital Surface Models with Generative Adversarial Networks

High-resolution digital surface models (DSMs) provide valuable height information about the Earth’s surface, which can be successfully combined with other types of remotely sensed data in a wide range of applications. However, the acquisition of DSMs with high spatial resolution is extremely time-consuming and expensive, with their estimation from a single optical image being an ill-possed problem. To overcome these limitation, this letter presents a new unpaired approach to obtain DSMs from optical images using deep learning techniques. Specifically, our new deep neural model is based on variational autoencoders (VAEs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs) to perform image-to-image translation, obtaining DSMs from optical images. Our newly proposed method has been tested in terms of photographic interpretation, reconstruction error, and classification accuracy using three well-known remotely sensed datasets with very high-spatial resolution (obtained over Potsdam, Vaihingen, and Stockholm). Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach obtains satisfactory reconstruction rates that allows enhancing the classification results for these images.